Jelly Belly Candy Co

About 275,000 wooden Adventure Playsets, distributed by Adventure Playsets of Amarillo, Texas, are being recalled because the materials in the horizontal ladder that forms the monkey bars and swing beam can weaken over time. This poses a fall hazard. The company has received more than 1,400 reports of rotting ladders and 16 reports of injuries, including nine emergency room visits. The sets were sold at Wal-Mart, Toys "R" Us, Academy Sports, Menards and Mill stores nationwide, and online at Walmart.

A sticky debate over free trade soured the U.S. candy industry's annual trade show in Chicago on Wednesday, pitting candy makers against sugar growers and labor unions. Unions and their supporters, protesting during the All Candy Expo, say the proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement will endanger more candy factory jobs. They already blame an exodus of candy factory jobs on the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement.

Black ribbons are affixed to the large jelly-bean mosaic portraits of Ronald Reagan at Jelly Belly Candy Co. The family-owned company that makes the tiny, intense-flavored candies owes a lot to the former president. Reagan's love for the candy "made us a worldwide company overnight," Chairman Herman Rowland said. It all began in 1967, when the Bay Area company started supplying Reagan, then serving his first term as California's governor, with miniature jelly beans to help him quit smoking.

His hair is disheveled; his red polo shirt stained. He's prone to shuffling when he walks and wears an oversized cowboy hat embroidered with jelly beans. "Now who here likes candy?" he asks, his voice both raspy and childish. The group of preschoolers who arrived with their mothers stare at the peculiar stranger and realize he is speaking their language. David Klein leads the way through his small Covina factory, where giant bags of dextrose and malic acid line the hall.

Sushi chef Jimmy Wu could carve a cucumber into a paper-thin scroll, but he knew his knife skills weren't enough to achieve his dream of owning a sushi restaurant. So he took the advice of a customer and contacted a former head of the California Restaurant Assn. The retired restaurant executive spent months teaching Wu the ins and outs of restaurant ownership and helping him scout locations.

WASHINGTON - Makers of sodas, candy bars and other sweetened snacks are taking aim at a long-standing federal program that keeps sugar prices high by restricting imports. Doing away with the sugar program would be a "huge boost" to candy makers and help them grow, said Robert Simpson Jr., president of Jelly Belly Candy Co., which has factories in Fairfield, Calif., Chicago and Thailand. But the efforts of manufacturers are sparking intense opposition among lawmakers from sugar-growing states and the sugar lobby, as well as from some public health advocates.

My pal Darby and I love to go where the wild things are. In his case, that's because he qualifies as one of them. Darby is a happy-go-lucky wheaten terrier with a penchant for travel. The mere whisper of the words "Let's go" unleashes boundless enthusiasm in him. We make great traveling companions because I also get pretty hyped when I hear those words, although I try not to leap around and whine. Last month the great outdoors called, and we answered with a resounding yes and a hearty woof.

After stepping down as U.S. treasurer last summer, Rosario Marin returned to the working-class Latino community of Huntington Park where she has lived since arriving from Mexico as a poor 14-year-old. She bought a new house on Hope Street. She painted it white and blue -- to go with the red roof. And she embarked on a campaign to convince her fellow Republicans that she is the candidate to knock Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer from office. Marin talks like it's destiny. "The future is now.

Sacramento "NotHING exciting ever happens in Sacramento." That's the oft-repeated rap against the state's capital, which has the misfortune of being so near and yet so far from tourist magnet San Francisco, just 90 freeway minutes away. The put-down was repeated -- and then rebutted -- by former Sacramento TV anchor Stan Atkinson, emcee for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's inauguration.